Royal Decree 933/2021: Spain's Guest Registration Rules

Parte de viajeros. RD 933/2021. SES.HOSPEDAJES. Three names used in Spain as though they were synonyms, for three different things: the submission itself, the rule that demands it, and the Ministry portal it travels through. This guide uses the names you will actually hear, without mixing up which is which.

That tangle of labels survived the successive moratoriums that held the register back, and it still feeds two expensive mistakes: assuming the clock only starts at check-in, and assuming the old paper report still counts for something.

What follows is what Royal Decree 933/2021¹ demands of individuals and legal entities carrying out lodging activities in Spain: who must comply, what data to collect, the deadline for sending it, how long to keep it, and what happens if you don’t. If you run a hotel, an apartment, a rural house or any regulated lodging, it applies to you directly.

Royal Decree 933/2021: start date and who has to comply

The decree was published in the BOE on 27 October 2021 and came into force six months later. Its third final provision set 2 January 2023 for the communication obligations, and the consolidated text still says exactly that today, with no later amendments². The date was never moved by amending the rule. It was moved by the Ministry of the Interior, which applied successive moratoriums while it built the platform and switched the register on for real on 2 December 2024, the date from which hotels, apartments, booking platforms, travel agencies and vehicle rental firms have had to report their customers’ data³.

SES.HOSPEDAJES also left the previous channel behind, the Guardia Civil’s Hospederías platform, which is where many lodgings had been filing the report for years. We cover it in what Hospederías was and why it no longer works.

It applies to every individual or legal entity providing lodging services. The practical list:

• Hotels, hostels, guesthouses.
• Tourist apartments and tourist-use dwellings (VUT).
• Rural houses, youth hostels, mountain refuges, campgrounds.
• Private vacation rentals on platforms (Airbnb, Booking, VRBO, etc.) when offered as tourist lodging.
• Seasonal rentals with lodging services.

Does it cover pure seasonal rental without lodging services? The current administrative reading is yes when there’s tourist turnover. The boundary is decided case by case. If in doubt, check with your advisor.

And the guest report stands in for nothing. The tourist licence is granted by your autonomous community and runs on its own track (what each one asks for). The single rental registry, the NRUA, was a third and separate obligation, and Spain’s Supreme Court annulled it in 2026 (what survives).

What RD 933/2021 requires in practice

Since 2 December 2024, every accommodation must:

1. Report the activity before starting it: the lessor company’s and the establishment’s details if the lodging is professional, or the owner’s and the property’s if it is not. Article 6.1 requires that filing before the activity begins, and article 6.2 gives ten days from the completion of the administrative formalities, and in any case before you actually start trading⁴. Any later change to those details triggers a fresh filing.
2. Collect the data of every traveller staying at the property.
3. Submit a guest report to the Spanish Ministry of the Interior through the SES.HOSPEDAJES platform.
4. Report the lodging reservation with the details of the stay (dates, number of guests, type of accommodation) when the booking arrives directly. If it arrives through a platform such as Booking or Airbnb, that report falls to the platform, which is an obliged subject in its own right.

The first one is the filing almost nobody knows exists. Registering on SES.HOSPEDAJES is not a commercial formality you get around to before your first guest report: it is the article 6.1 obligation, and it has a deadline of its own.

Electronically. Article 6.4 exempts anyone carrying out lodging non-professionally from the electronic route, but it refers them to a procedure the Ministry has never published⁴, so in practice SES.HOSPEDAJES is the only channel and the old paper reports are no longer accepted.

Royal Decree 933/2021: what guest data must be collected

The rule requires, as a minimum:

• Full name (first name, first surname, and second surname for Spanish documents).
• Sex and date of birth.
• Nationality.
• Type and number of ID document. Annex I names three types: DNI, passport and TIE⁵.
• Support number (required for the Spanish DNI).
• Usual residential address.
• Contact phone and/or email.
• Relationship (parentesco) to an accompanying adult, required while the traveller is a minor in law, so up to 18.

The NIE is not on that list, and that is not an oversight: the NIE is a number, not a document. A guest handing you a TIE is giving you their NIE printed on it, and a guest handing you the green EU registration certificate is not giving you an identity document at all. We take the difference apart in NIE, TIE, NIF and DNI.

For the lodging reservation, the contract details are added, along with the details of its performance, of the property and of the payment. We list them field by field below.

Children under 14 are on the record: article 5.1 expressly includes their data⁶. What is not asked of them is a signature or a document of their own, because the adult they travel with supplies both. We go deeper into how the rule applies to children and teenagers in Minors in guest registration.

Spain guest data law 933/2021: deadline for submission

This is the question that comes up most. Article 6.3 requires the communication to be made immediately and in any case within 24 hours of two distinct moments⁴:

• Making the reservation or formalising the contract, or where applicable cancelling it.
• The start of the contracted services.

In other words, the clock does not start only at check-in: the reservation and its cancellation each carry their own 24-hour deadline.

In practice:

• The guest report is sent to the Ministry within the first hours of the stay.
• The lodging reservation, when it is yours to file, can be sent earlier (when the booking is confirmed) or together with the guest report.
• A cancellation is reported if the reservation had already been submitted and the guest doesn’t arrive.

Sending a report a week later is an untimely communication. Sanctionable.

How long must guest data be kept?

Three years, counted from the end of the contracted service, not from check-in and not from the day you filed the report⁶.

After that period, data must be deleted or anonymised. The retention is fixed by the rule, not discretionary. Keeping it longer without an additional legal basis would breach GDPR.

Article 5.4 exempts anyone carrying out lodging non-professionally from the record-keeping and retention duties: all that is left for them are the article 6 reporting duties⁶. Activity counts as professional, on the Ministry’s own reading, when you are entered in the Censo de Empresarios, Profesionales y Retenedores, the Spanish tax register of businesses and professionals⁷, which is where practically every tourist accommodation manager sits.

Your software should purge automatically. If you plan to do it by hand, you won’t.

What is SES.HOSPEDAJES?

SES.HOSPEDAJES is the Spanish Ministry of the Interior’s platform, run by the Secretary of State for Security. It’s where you submit guest reports and lodging reservations. What it is, how you get in and what travels through it is worked through in the SES.HOSPEDAJES guide.

The submission process is complex and not practical to do by hand. Most accommodations need software that automates the generation and submission of the reports.

To access SES.HOSPEDAJES you need:

• A lessor code assigned by the system at registration.
• An establishment code for each property.
• Access credentials (SOAP username and password) for automatic submission.

We explain how to request each in How to obtain SES.HOSPEDAJES credentials step by step. When a submission is rejected, the portal answers with a code: the most frequent ones are in SES.HOSPEDAJES error codes. And when the portal itself is what has failed, rather than your submission, we diagnose it in SES.HOSPEDAJES not working.

What is sent to SES.HOSPEDAJES: guest report and reservation

A normal stay generates two separate communications:

• Guest report: the personal data of each registered guest.
• Lodging reservation: the contract details and the details of the stay.

Point 4 of section A) of Annex I spells out what the reservation carries, and it is more than most people expect⁵:

• Contract details: reference number, date and signatures.
• Performance of the contract: date and time of entry, date and time of exit.
• Property details: full address, number of rooms and whether it has an Internet connection.
• Payment details: type, identification of the means, holder, card expiry date and date of payment.

Section B), the non-professional regime, asks for the same, with the property details gathered under a point of their own. The Annex makes none of those blocks conditional on the type of accommodation or on the length of the stay.

They do not travel together: on the portal you pick one communication type or the other, and each carries its own trigger and its own 24-hour deadline. The booking goes out when the reservation is made; the traveller report when the stay begins. Nor does the same party always file them: the traveller report is always the lodging’s, while the booking falls to whoever took the reservation, which on a platform sale is the platform. We work through it in reserva de hospedaje or parte de viajeros. Once processed, each communication gets its own acceptance confirmation, or the detail of the errors to fix.

RD 933/2021 and payment card data: is it mandatory?

A question that comes up in every conversation with owners.

The rule includes payment-method data among the fields required for the lodging reservation. Yes. So you have to collect:

• Type of payment method (cash, credit card, payment platform, bank transfer).
• Holder of the payment method.
• Identification of the means: for a card, the type and the number; for a transfer, the account IBAN.
• Expiry date of the card.
• Date of payment.

That list is worth reading twice, because it is more than most people expect: Annex I asks for the card number and its expiry date, not just the last four digits⁵. The one thing that appears nowhere in the Annex is the CVV, which is never reported.

And there is no small print softening it. The Annex asks for the payment block under both regimes it distinguishes, professional and non-professional, without conditioning it on the type of accommodation or the length of the stay. The note with which the Ministry switched the register on puts it the same way: on the commercial side you must specify the means of payment and identify the transaction whenever it is settled by credit card, bank transfer or digital payment platform³.

This is payment data travelling inside an administrative filing, so it deserves handling to match. Collecting it in a spreadsheet or over email is precisely what not to do.

What happens if I don’t comply?

Failing to comply can lead to administrative penalties.

Article 8 of RD 933/2021 refers to public-safety legislation (Organic Law 4/2015) and provides for only two classifications⁸. Filing the report late, or with irregularities, is a minor infraction: €100 to €600. Not filing it, or not keeping the documentary registers, is a serious infraction: €601 to €30,000, with the fine set at the minimum degree (€601 to €10,400) absent closed aggravating circumstances. There is no very serious infraction through this route. We break it down in Penalties for non-compliance with RD 933/2021.

Beyond the fines, proper guest registration is the responsibility of every tourist accommodation operator.

Which autonomous communities have their own regulations?

Most autonomous communities use the Ministry’s SES.HOSPEDAJES. Two exceptions:

• Catalonia: reporting goes to the Mossos d’Esquadra through the Generalitat’s system.
• Basque Country: reporting goes to the Ertzaintza through the Basque Government’s system.

If your property is in either, you’ll need the regional system. We dig into the why and how in Guest registration in Catalonia and the Basque Country.

FAQ

Since when is the SES.HOSPEDAJES guest report mandatory in Spain? The SES.HOSPEDAJES guest report has been mandatory in Spain since 2 December 2024, the date on which the Ministry of the Interior switched the register on after successive moratoriums. From then on, hotels, tourist apartments, rural houses, campgrounds, and vacation rentals listed on platforms like Airbnb or Booking must report each guest’s data electronically to the Spanish Ministry of the Interior. The old paper reports are no longer accepted.

How long do I have to submit a guest’s report? You have a maximum of 24 hours to submit a guest’s report. Article 6.3 counts that window from two moments: making the reservation or formalising the contract (or, where applicable, cancelling it), and the start of the contracted services. The communication must be made immediately within that window. Sending the report a week later is an untimely communication and therefore a minor infraction, fined €100 to €600.

Do I have to collect the guest’s card details? From the guest’s card you have to collect more than is usually assumed. For the lodging reservation, Annex I of RD 933/2021 includes the type of means (cash, card, payment platform, bank transfer), the holder, identification of the means (for a card, the type and the number; for a transfer, the IBAN), the card’s expiry date and the date of payment. The CVV is not on the list and is never reported. The Annex asks for that block under both regimes it governs, professional and non-professional, without conditioning it on the type of lodging or the length of the stay.

When must guest data be deleted? Guest data must be deleted after three years counted from the end of the contracted service: once that period passes it has to be erased or anonymised, because the retention period is fixed by the rule and keeping it longer without an additional legal basis would breach GDPR. The sensible approach is software that purges automatically rather than relying on manual deletion.

How RegistroViajero simplifies compliance

RegistroViajero automates the entire RD 933/2021 process:

1. Digital check-in: each guest receives a unique link on their phone, fills in their details and signs an accuracy declaration, in 9 languages. No document photo to upload: the Annex I fields are typed in, by design.
2. Automatic validation: the system checks that all mandatory fields are complete and valid before allowing submission.
3. Direct submission to SES.HOSPEDAJES: generates and sends the reports to the Ministry with one click. No manual intervention.
4. Status tracking: queries the result of each submission and notifies you of errors or rejections.
5. Reservation import: syncs your reservations from Booking.com, Airbnb, VRBO, Expedia, Tripadvisor, and Google Calendar. Learn how to sync the portals via iCal.

If you want to see the full end-to-end flow, from booking to Ministry submission, without setting up a tool yet, we walk through it in how to automate guest registration. And if you’re choosing between tools, compare the options in the best guest registration apps for Spain. And if you hold an NRUA, remember the annual VAU 1560/2025 deposit that falls due every February.

This article is for informational purposes and does not replace professional legal advice.